Friday, August 29, 2008

Comics have such a simple little bag of tricks. Some tiny drawings in boxes, a few words contained in a bubble, a handful of rough-hewn symbols. Almost nothing to it. But the closer you look, the more you come to appreciate their almost endless possibilities.

And those drawings aren’t really silent either. There is implied noise within them. It’s hard to put your finger on why that noise is there, but it is. Just recently, I was drawing a comic book page that demanded a perfectly silent scene. Just leaving out the sound effects or word balloons didn’t do it. Even drawings of a character sitting alone in a darkened room did not imply total quiet. In the end, I was forced to letter in, at the top of the panels, the words “utter silence.”